Film and Fiction

Undergraduate / Graduate

This course addresses three distinct but related critical problems in the contemporary understanding of film and fiction. The most general is the question of how we might go about linking the practice of criticism in the literary arts with that of the screen arts. Where are the common issues of structure, form, narration, point of view management, and the like? Where are the crucial differences that lie in the particularities of each domain? The second problem has to do more specifically with questions of adaptation. Adaptation is a fact of our cultural experience that we encounter in many circumstances, but perhaps in none more insistently as when we witness the reproduction of a literary narrative in cinematic or televisual form. Adaptation theory has taught us to look beyond the narrow criterion of "fidelity" as far too limiting in scope. But when we look beyond, what do we look for, and what other concepts guide our exploration? The third and final problem has to do with the now rampant genre of the "film based on fact," especially when the facts derive from a particular source text. What are its particular genre markings (e.g., excessive stylization, the use of documentary footage of the actual persons and events involved)? How does fictionalization operate on the facts? Fiction by, among others, Guy de Maupassant, Patricia Highsmith, Dorothy Hughes, James M. Cain, and Graham Greene. Films by, among others, Jean Renoir, Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese, Patricia Rozema.